Bush using 'HO's' against muslims at Guantanamo prison camp
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Containing Torture<font face="tahoma" size="4" color="#0000ff"><b>
How Torture Begets Even More Torture</b></font>
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By Darius Rejali
Friday, Oct. 27, 2006</b>
President Bush has insisted that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is an essential tool for military and CIA prosecution of the war against terrorists. And yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney <font color="#FF0000"><b>argued that choking</b></FONT> someone in water to gather needed intelligence is a "no brainer" and that the MCA covered the White House's "fairly robust interrogation program," including this technique. Legislation of this sort is always slippery, and the newspapers and legal blogs are full of disagreements about exactly what the new law means and what its effects will be. But one lasting effect is almost certain: Historically, laws like the Military Commissions Act have powerful corrupting forces on the militaries that use them, making them less able to achieve their ultimate goals.
<br>The MCA creates a two-track system for interrogation: CIA interrogators can use painful, physical, "enhanced interrogation" techniques; military interrogators cannot. But it is only a matter of time before military interrogators will wonder why they are stuck using techniques that are allegedly less effective than the CIA's. Then, they too will start quietly adopting these "robust" interrogation techniques.
<br>Prior to the enactment of the new legislation, the definition of torture, for both military and CIA interrogators, was broad and comprehensive. Torture was defined as an "act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions)" on someone in his control. This definition affirmed the definition of torture in the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10029/Torture1.jpg" align="right"></div>
<br>The MCA changed the definition of torture. In clarifying what "severe physical or mental pain or suffering meant," it created a new standard: Torture must involve a "substantial risk of death, extreme physical pain, a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature, not to include cuts, abrasions or bruises; or significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ or mental faculty."
Every torturer knows death in torture is failure, as is driving your prisoner mad. This is why most torturers around the world avoid techniques that cause serious risk of organ failure, madness, or substantial risk of death. The new U.S. legislation absurdly disqualifies as torture not just the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA, but the vast majority of techniques used by torturers worldwide. Among the CIA's authorized techniques, only choking someone in water comes close to failing to meet this standard, and even this is debatable. The vice president, who endorsed waterboarding in some circumstances, clearly believes it does not, emphasizing yesterday that "we don't torture" and that he is not the vice president "for torture."
<br>Is anyone so credulous as to believe that these "alternative" techniques will remain confined to the CIA interrogators? There is ample cause to believe that the new techniques will seep into other agencies. And by their very nature, these techniques are almost impossible to prove after the fact.
<br>We have seen this pattern before in the war on terror. In Iraq and Afghanistan, <font color="#FF0000"><b>soldiers reported</b></font> having learned their interrogation techniques by imitating CIA field officers. This slippery slope will now undoubtedly be slicker and sharper with the official endorsement of enhanced interrogation techniques.
<div align="left"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/02/16/wtort16.jpg" align="left"></div>
<br>New interrogation manuals, recently disseminated by the Pentagon, sharply discourage torture, but it is unlikely that military investigators will ever catch interrogators using these techniques. This is because all of the reported CIA techniques for enhanced interrogation—such as stress positions, waterboarding, and exposure to extreme temperatures—leave no lasting marks on the body. Again, this is not news to U.S. military interrogators. "No blood, no foul" was the motto of a group of American military interrogators who tortured at <font color="#FF0000"><b>Camp Nama, outside Baghdad</b></font>
<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://nyc.indymedia.org/images/2006/02/65034.jpg" align="right"></div>.
<br>It is only a matter of time before new rot sets into the U.S. military, thanks to the new MCA. This is inevitable when you codify a two-track interrogation system. In the 1970s, the Brazilian military had a similar two-track system, and the state had to eliminate its torturers in order to preserve itself. As Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari observed at the time: "Unless everyone in the army participates in torture, you very quickly develop two kinds of soldiers." He called them "the combatants," who fight the terrorists with torture, and the "bureaucrats," who are committed to preserving the military's everyday functioning and discipline. In Brazil, the day came when the combatant-torturers refused to accept the orders of the bureaucrats and regarded with contempt their peers who were committed to army discipline. The generals eventually concluded that "[t]he torturers were going to have to be isolated, marginalized and eliminated, <em>so as to save the Army.</em>"
<br>And this corruption will not be limited to the military. Two-track interrogation systems have similar corrupting influences in domestic policing, particularly as former interrogators and MPs seek jobs as police officers after being decommissioned. The military tortures in the Franco-Algerian War soon seeped into French policing in the 1960s. And in the United States, this kind of slippage has happened twice: initially, as the water tortures of the Spanish-American War began appearing in police stations in the 1920s, and again as electrical techniques used during the Vietnam War appeared in Chicago policing in the 1970s. These torturers-turned-policemen-turned-torturers were especially attracted to techniques that were clean, and there is every reason to believe that the clean techniques now approved in the Iraq war will, sooner or later, appear in a neighborhood near you.
<br>The nasty thing about "clean" torture techniques—and especially the six reportedly approved CIA techniques: the attention grab, the attention slap, the belly slap, the cold room, forced standing, and waterboarding—is that no one can tell how much pain the subject is in as the torture is done. And after the fact, victims have nothing to show to their communities or even to their families—who want to believe them.
<br>Clean tortures are unlike other tortures because they are calculated to prevent any kind of public expression of outrage or sympathy. They are also exceedingly hard to monitor and track, so their corrupting influence is pernicious.
<br>Forced standing was regular fare in Stalinist prisons and German concentration camps, where there were, sometimes, specialized "standing cells." The CIA's own study of this technique showed that ankles and feet swell to twice their normal size within 24 hours. Moving becomes agony, and large blisters develop. The heart rate increases, and some prisoners faint.
<br>Japan's fascist military police, the Kempeitai, routinely used hard slapping in the interrogation and punishment of Allied prisoners of war. "There can be few Allied prisoners of war," wrote Lord Russell of Liverpool, "who were not at some time slapped," adding that "a Japanese slap was something to remember." The pain and humiliation, he said, were intense. Few Allied prisoners would have been inclined to be forgiving when, in 1946, Prime Minister Tojo humbly apologized to the Allies for this particular form of torture.
<br>Hard shaking is a well-known Israeli torture technique the Palestinians call "al-Hazz," one that doctors suspect can cause long-term brain damage. And cold rooms are well-known features of the worst days of American policing: from the nasty days of the Denver Black Hole and Chicago policing in the 1920s, to the Alabama police of the 1960s, who froze Freedom Riders in chilled cells.
<br>Which brings us to the most notorious torture: waterboarding, or choking someone in water. In 1968, a soldier in the 1st Cavalry Division was court-martialed for waterboarding a prisoner in Vietnam. In fact, the practice was identified as a crime as early as 1901, when the Army judge advocate general court-martialed Maj. Edwin Glenn of the 5th U.S. Infantry for waterboarding, a technique he did not hesitate to call torture.
<br>That military judge went further, anticipating (and then dismissing) a key justification President Bush and his allies use for torture today. The judge said that the defense of needing to obtain information through torture "falls completely," even when at war with "a savage or semi-civilized enemy" who conducts "his operations in violation of the rules of civilized war. This no modern State will admit for an instant."
<br>Except, it seems, the United States in 2006.
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<i>Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College. He is the author of Torture and Modernity (Westview) and the forthcoming Torture and Democracy (Princeton)</i></font>
<font face="arial black" size="7" color="#d90000">
Containing Torture<font face="tahoma" size="4" color="#0000ff"><b>
How Torture Begets Even More Torture</b></font>
<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10029/Bush_Cheney_Rumsfeld.jpg">
<font face="helvetica, verdana" size="3" color="#000000"><b>
By Darius Rejali
Friday, Oct. 27, 2006</b>
President Bush has insisted that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is an essential tool for military and CIA prosecution of the war against terrorists. And yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney <font color="#FF0000"><b>argued that choking</b></FONT> someone in water to gather needed intelligence is a "no brainer" and that the MCA covered the White House's "fairly robust interrogation program," including this technique. Legislation of this sort is always slippery, and the newspapers and legal blogs are full of disagreements about exactly what the new law means and what its effects will be. But one lasting effect is almost certain: Historically, laws like the Military Commissions Act have powerful corrupting forces on the militaries that use them, making them less able to achieve their ultimate goals.
<br>The MCA creates a two-track system for interrogation: CIA interrogators can use painful, physical, "enhanced interrogation" techniques; military interrogators cannot. But it is only a matter of time before military interrogators will wonder why they are stuck using techniques that are allegedly less effective than the CIA's. Then, they too will start quietly adopting these "robust" interrogation techniques.
<br>Prior to the enactment of the new legislation, the definition of torture, for both military and CIA interrogators, was broad and comprehensive. Torture was defined as an "act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions)" on someone in his control. This definition affirmed the definition of torture in the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10029/Torture1.jpg" align="right"></div>
<br>The MCA changed the definition of torture. In clarifying what "severe physical or mental pain or suffering meant," it created a new standard: Torture must involve a "substantial risk of death, extreme physical pain, a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature, not to include cuts, abrasions or bruises; or significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ or mental faculty."
Every torturer knows death in torture is failure, as is driving your prisoner mad. This is why most torturers around the world avoid techniques that cause serious risk of organ failure, madness, or substantial risk of death. The new U.S. legislation absurdly disqualifies as torture not just the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA, but the vast majority of techniques used by torturers worldwide. Among the CIA's authorized techniques, only choking someone in water comes close to failing to meet this standard, and even this is debatable. The vice president, who endorsed waterboarding in some circumstances, clearly believes it does not, emphasizing yesterday that "we don't torture" and that he is not the vice president "for torture."
<br>Is anyone so credulous as to believe that these "alternative" techniques will remain confined to the CIA interrogators? There is ample cause to believe that the new techniques will seep into other agencies. And by their very nature, these techniques are almost impossible to prove after the fact.
<br>We have seen this pattern before in the war on terror. In Iraq and Afghanistan, <font color="#FF0000"><b>soldiers reported</b></font> having learned their interrogation techniques by imitating CIA field officers. This slippery slope will now undoubtedly be slicker and sharper with the official endorsement of enhanced interrogation techniques.
<div align="left"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/02/16/wtort16.jpg" align="left"></div>
<br>New interrogation manuals, recently disseminated by the Pentagon, sharply discourage torture, but it is unlikely that military investigators will ever catch interrogators using these techniques. This is because all of the reported CIA techniques for enhanced interrogation—such as stress positions, waterboarding, and exposure to extreme temperatures—leave no lasting marks on the body. Again, this is not news to U.S. military interrogators. "No blood, no foul" was the motto of a group of American military interrogators who tortured at <font color="#FF0000"><b>Camp Nama, outside Baghdad</b></font>
<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://nyc.indymedia.org/images/2006/02/65034.jpg" align="right"></div>.
<br>It is only a matter of time before new rot sets into the U.S. military, thanks to the new MCA. This is inevitable when you codify a two-track interrogation system. In the 1970s, the Brazilian military had a similar two-track system, and the state had to eliminate its torturers in order to preserve itself. As Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari observed at the time: "Unless everyone in the army participates in torture, you very quickly develop two kinds of soldiers." He called them "the combatants," who fight the terrorists with torture, and the "bureaucrats," who are committed to preserving the military's everyday functioning and discipline. In Brazil, the day came when the combatant-torturers refused to accept the orders of the bureaucrats and regarded with contempt their peers who were committed to army discipline. The generals eventually concluded that "[t]he torturers were going to have to be isolated, marginalized and eliminated, <em>so as to save the Army.</em>"
<br>And this corruption will not be limited to the military. Two-track interrogation systems have similar corrupting influences in domestic policing, particularly as former interrogators and MPs seek jobs as police officers after being decommissioned. The military tortures in the Franco-Algerian War soon seeped into French policing in the 1960s. And in the United States, this kind of slippage has happened twice: initially, as the water tortures of the Spanish-American War began appearing in police stations in the 1920s, and again as electrical techniques used during the Vietnam War appeared in Chicago policing in the 1970s. These torturers-turned-policemen-turned-torturers were especially attracted to techniques that were clean, and there is every reason to believe that the clean techniques now approved in the Iraq war will, sooner or later, appear in a neighborhood near you.
<br>The nasty thing about "clean" torture techniques—and especially the six reportedly approved CIA techniques: the attention grab, the attention slap, the belly slap, the cold room, forced standing, and waterboarding—is that no one can tell how much pain the subject is in as the torture is done. And after the fact, victims have nothing to show to their communities or even to their families—who want to believe them.
<br>Clean tortures are unlike other tortures because they are calculated to prevent any kind of public expression of outrage or sympathy. They are also exceedingly hard to monitor and track, so their corrupting influence is pernicious.
<br>Forced standing was regular fare in Stalinist prisons and German concentration camps, where there were, sometimes, specialized "standing cells." The CIA's own study of this technique showed that ankles and feet swell to twice their normal size within 24 hours. Moving becomes agony, and large blisters develop. The heart rate increases, and some prisoners faint.
<br>Japan's fascist military police, the Kempeitai, routinely used hard slapping in the interrogation and punishment of Allied prisoners of war. "There can be few Allied prisoners of war," wrote Lord Russell of Liverpool, "who were not at some time slapped," adding that "a Japanese slap was something to remember." The pain and humiliation, he said, were intense. Few Allied prisoners would have been inclined to be forgiving when, in 1946, Prime Minister Tojo humbly apologized to the Allies for this particular form of torture.
<br>Hard shaking is a well-known Israeli torture technique the Palestinians call "al-Hazz," one that doctors suspect can cause long-term brain damage. And cold rooms are well-known features of the worst days of American policing: from the nasty days of the Denver Black Hole and Chicago policing in the 1920s, to the Alabama police of the 1960s, who froze Freedom Riders in chilled cells.
<br>Which brings us to the most notorious torture: waterboarding, or choking someone in water. In 1968, a soldier in the 1st Cavalry Division was court-martialed for waterboarding a prisoner in Vietnam. In fact, the practice was identified as a crime as early as 1901, when the Army judge advocate general court-martialed Maj. Edwin Glenn of the 5th U.S. Infantry for waterboarding, a technique he did not hesitate to call torture.
<br>That military judge went further, anticipating (and then dismissing) a key justification President Bush and his allies use for torture today. The judge said that the defense of needing to obtain information through torture "falls completely," even when at war with "a savage or semi-civilized enemy" who conducts "his operations in violation of the rules of civilized war. This no modern State will admit for an instant."
<br>Except, it seems, the United States in 2006.
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="8"></hr>
<i>Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College. He is the author of Torture and Modernity (Westview) and the forthcoming Torture and Democracy (Princeton)</i></font>
Interview of soldier participant and eyewitness account of tourture...
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Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
From the NY Times
Fucking bomshell
October 4, 2007
Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
By SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
This article is by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.
Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.
A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.
More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.
When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.
Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.
The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.
Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”
The debate over how terrorist suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.
The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.
But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.
Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office’s proper role.
“The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,” said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, “lost its ability to say no.”
“The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,” Mr. Kmiec said. “The office became an advocate for the president’s policies.”
From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?
The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.
Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.
With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.
“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.
Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”
The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.
That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. “You think you’re making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ‘Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “We couldn’t tell them, ‘Do the best you can,’ because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.”
Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.
That opinion, which would become infamous as “the torture memo” after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president’s adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.
Mr. Yoo’s memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.
Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program “has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review” and “has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.”
“The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,” Mr. Little added.
Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.’s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed’s background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.
Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda’s structure and plans.
“We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,” Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. “We were getting good information, and then they were told: ‘Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.’”
The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general’s hospital bedside.
Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith, who left the Justice Department soon afterward, first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.”
A single footnote — added to reassure the C.I.A. — suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency’s previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation as attorney general.
If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.
Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith’s dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.
Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith’s rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official recalled.
Mr. Bradbury’s biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury’s father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.
Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.
“We all grew up together,” said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. “You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.”
But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.
Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.
“As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,” said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. “At O.L.C., you’re not writing law review articles and you’re not theorizing. You’re giving a client practical advice on a real problem.”
As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president’s lawyer.
Mr. Bradbury appeared to be “fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,” recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times “vituperative,” said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was “professional and collegial.”
While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.
Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was “very troubled” at the notion of a probationary period.
“If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,” Mr. Cooper said. “You’re implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.”
Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. “No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion,” he said. “Every opinion I’ve signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires.”
Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.
“For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste — extremely hazardous to their health,” Mr. Horton said.
“If you give the administration what it wants, you’ll lose credibility in the academic community,” he said. “But if you hold back, you’ll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.”
In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury’s approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.
Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.
Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.
But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.
“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.
Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade campus on Law Day — a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program — Mr. Comey spoke of the “agonizing collisions” of the law and the desire to protect Americans.
“We are likely to hear the words: ‘If we don’t do this, people will die,’” Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.
“It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most,” he said. “It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.”
Mr. Gonzales’s aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.
Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.’s methods.
The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture — the prohibition on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment.
Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.
At the administration’s request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.
At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.
“If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,” Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, “then they are now saying that officials broke current law.”
In the end, Mr. Bradbury’s opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.’s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.
Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that “shocks the conscience” was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.
In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.
Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration’s defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an “Ask the White House” feature on a Web site.
Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury’s public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role.
A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury’s active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press “entirely appropriate” and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury “has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency” on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs.
Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel’s assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury’s role in interrogation policy.
“There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable,” Mr. Durbin said.
John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy’s top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.
“I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country’s good, some people will do a lot of it for the country’s better,” Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.
“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.
From the NY Times
Fucking bomshell
October 4, 2007
Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
By SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
This article is by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.
Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.
A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.
More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.
When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.
Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.
The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.
Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”
The debate over how terrorist suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.
The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.
But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.
Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office’s proper role.
“The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,” said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, “lost its ability to say no.”
“The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,” Mr. Kmiec said. “The office became an advocate for the president’s policies.”
From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?
The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.
Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.
With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.
“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.
Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”
The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.
That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. “You think you’re making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ‘Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “We couldn’t tell them, ‘Do the best you can,’ because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.”
Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.
That opinion, which would become infamous as “the torture memo” after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president’s adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.
Mr. Yoo’s memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.
Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program “has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review” and “has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.”
“The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,” Mr. Little added.
Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.’s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed’s background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.
Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda’s structure and plans.
“We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,” Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. “We were getting good information, and then they were told: ‘Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.’”
The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general’s hospital bedside.
Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith, who left the Justice Department soon afterward, first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.”
A single footnote — added to reassure the C.I.A. — suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency’s previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation as attorney general.
If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.
Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith’s dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.
Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith’s rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official recalled.
Mr. Bradbury’s biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury’s father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.
Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.
“We all grew up together,” said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. “You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.”
But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.
Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.
“As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,” said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. “At O.L.C., you’re not writing law review articles and you’re not theorizing. You’re giving a client practical advice on a real problem.”
As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president’s lawyer.
Mr. Bradbury appeared to be “fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,” recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times “vituperative,” said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was “professional and collegial.”
While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.
Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was “very troubled” at the notion of a probationary period.
“If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,” Mr. Cooper said. “You’re implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.”
Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. “No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion,” he said. “Every opinion I’ve signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires.”
Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.
“For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste — extremely hazardous to their health,” Mr. Horton said.
“If you give the administration what it wants, you’ll lose credibility in the academic community,” he said. “But if you hold back, you’ll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.”
In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury’s approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.
Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.
Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.
But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.
“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.
Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade campus on Law Day — a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program — Mr. Comey spoke of the “agonizing collisions” of the law and the desire to protect Americans.
“We are likely to hear the words: ‘If we don’t do this, people will die,’” Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.
“It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most,” he said. “It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.”
Mr. Gonzales’s aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.
Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.’s methods.
The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture — the prohibition on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment.
Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.
At the administration’s request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.
At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.
“If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,” Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, “then they are now saying that officials broke current law.”
In the end, Mr. Bradbury’s opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.’s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.
Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that “shocks the conscience” was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.
In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.
Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration’s defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an “Ask the White House” feature on a Web site.
Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury’s public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role.
A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury’s active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press “entirely appropriate” and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury “has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency” on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs.
Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel’s assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury’s role in interrogation policy.
“There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable,” Mr. Durbin said.
John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy’s top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.
“I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country’s good, some people will do a lot of it for the country’s better,” Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.
“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.
Re: Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
<font size="5"><center>
Obama Bans Torture</font size><font size="4">
President Signs Executive Orders on
Interrogations and Detention Policy Options</font size></center>
Excerpted from:
The Huffington Post
By Andy Worthington
Journalist and author "Guantanamo Files"
January 23, 2009
[President Barack Obama signed an Order which] establishes that the questioning of prisoners by any U.S. government agency must follow the interrogation guidelines laid down in the Army Field Manual, which guarantees humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions, and, of course, prohibits the use of torture.
Reverting to the "requirements" of the Federal torture statute, the UN Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and other legislation and treaties, the Order states that "in all circumstances" prisoners will be "treated humanely and shall not be subjected to violence to life and person (including murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture), nor to outrages upon personal dignity (including humiliating and degrading treatment)."
As a result, the Order states, "All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order."
The Order also specifically revokes President Bush's Executive Order 13440 of July 20, 2007, which "reaffirm[ed]" his "determination," on February 7, 2002, that "members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces are unlawful enemy combatants who are not entitled to the protections that the Third Geneva Convention provides to prisoners of war," sought to grant himself the right to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions" as he saw fit, and also sought to exclude the CIA from any oversight whatsoever.
It also orders the CIA to "close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates," adding that the agency "shall not operate any such detention facility in the future," and orders all departments and agencies of the government to allow representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross to have "timely access" to all prisoners.
And finally, the Order establishes a Special Interagency Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies, to evaluate "whether the interrogation practices and techniques in the Army Field manual, when employed by departments or agencies outside the military, provide an appropriate means of acquiring the intelligence necessary to protect the Nation, and, if warranted, to recommend any additional or different guidelines for other departments or agencies." The Task Force is also required to evaluate "the practices of transferring individuals to other nations," to ensure that they do not face torture.
Related to this is a third Order, establishing another Special Interagency Task Force to provide an overview of detention policy options, which is charged with "conducting a comprehensive review of the lawful options available to the Federal Government with respect to the apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations, and to identify such options as are consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice." Both Task Forces are to report their findings in the next six months.
The verdict
The majority of the Order regarding interrogations is a triumphant return to the rule of law, achieved by revoking all the "executive directives, orders, and regulations" that manifested the Bush administration's slippery zeal for allowing torture, by insisting on adherence to the Army Field Manual, which prohibits the use of physical violence, and, as above, by returning to the Geneva Conventions, with their prohibitions on "cruel and inhumane treatment" and coerced interrogations. However, although a sweeping repudiation of these documents is a start, I look forward to further detailed analysis from the White House regarding the secret memos and presidential orders that purported to justify the Bush administration's flight from the law and its attempts to justify torture.
And while it is wonderful to read that the CIA is obliged to close all secret prisons, it is absolutely imperative that this announcement is swiftly followed by the establishment of a robust means of accounting for the unknown number of prisoners (PDF) subjected to "extraordinary rendition" and torture, either in prisons run by the CIA or by other governments prepared to lend their torturers to the United States.
In addition, while the Order establishing a Task Force to overview detention policy insists that only "lawful options" are pursued, the Task Force on interrogation and transfer policies seems to be set up to find ways in which "extraordinary rendition" can be justified -- though not, admittedly, on an industrial scale -- and also seems designed to "recommend ... additional or different guidance" for agencies outside the military, which is troubling, of course, as this, in essence, is exactly what has been happening for the last seven years, with such dire results. The President should resist all calls for exceptions to lawful procedures, and confirm, categorically, his absolute commitment to non-coercive methods of interrogation, which have a proven track record. See, for example, the Human Rights First report (PDF) examining 107 terror trials on the U.S. mainland, and Jane Mayer's article on the FBI's interrogation of an-Qaeda informant.
I should also note that, just two weeks ago, psychologist and anti-torture activist Jeffrey S. Kaye explained, in an article for AlterNet, that, though widely praised by everyone in the new administration, including President Obama, the revised version of the Army Field Manual contains an Appendix that apparently keeps the door open for the use of the same torture techniques taught in U.S. military schools to train U.S. personnel to resist interrogation that were implemented by the Bush administration and that led directly to the widespread abuse of prisoners in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as a Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF) explained last month.
`
<font size="5"><center>
Obama Bans Torture</font size><font size="4">
President Signs Executive Orders on
Interrogations and Detention Policy Options</font size></center>
Excerpted from:
The Huffington Post
By Andy Worthington
Journalist and author "Guantanamo Files"
January 23, 2009
[President Barack Obama signed an Order which] establishes that the questioning of prisoners by any U.S. government agency must follow the interrogation guidelines laid down in the Army Field Manual, which guarantees humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions, and, of course, prohibits the use of torture.
Reverting to the "requirements" of the Federal torture statute, the UN Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and other legislation and treaties, the Order states that "in all circumstances" prisoners will be "treated humanely and shall not be subjected to violence to life and person (including murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture), nor to outrages upon personal dignity (including humiliating and degrading treatment)."
As a result, the Order states, "All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order."
The Order also specifically revokes President Bush's Executive Order 13440 of July 20, 2007, which "reaffirm[ed]" his "determination," on February 7, 2002, that "members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces are unlawful enemy combatants who are not entitled to the protections that the Third Geneva Convention provides to prisoners of war," sought to grant himself the right to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions" as he saw fit, and also sought to exclude the CIA from any oversight whatsoever.
It also orders the CIA to "close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates," adding that the agency "shall not operate any such detention facility in the future," and orders all departments and agencies of the government to allow representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross to have "timely access" to all prisoners.
And finally, the Order establishes a Special Interagency Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies, to evaluate "whether the interrogation practices and techniques in the Army Field manual, when employed by departments or agencies outside the military, provide an appropriate means of acquiring the intelligence necessary to protect the Nation, and, if warranted, to recommend any additional or different guidelines for other departments or agencies." The Task Force is also required to evaluate "the practices of transferring individuals to other nations," to ensure that they do not face torture.
Related to this is a third Order, establishing another Special Interagency Task Force to provide an overview of detention policy options, which is charged with "conducting a comprehensive review of the lawful options available to the Federal Government with respect to the apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations, and to identify such options as are consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice." Both Task Forces are to report their findings in the next six months.
The verdict
The majority of the Order regarding interrogations is a triumphant return to the rule of law, achieved by revoking all the "executive directives, orders, and regulations" that manifested the Bush administration's slippery zeal for allowing torture, by insisting on adherence to the Army Field Manual, which prohibits the use of physical violence, and, as above, by returning to the Geneva Conventions, with their prohibitions on "cruel and inhumane treatment" and coerced interrogations. However, although a sweeping repudiation of these documents is a start, I look forward to further detailed analysis from the White House regarding the secret memos and presidential orders that purported to justify the Bush administration's flight from the law and its attempts to justify torture.
And while it is wonderful to read that the CIA is obliged to close all secret prisons, it is absolutely imperative that this announcement is swiftly followed by the establishment of a robust means of accounting for the unknown number of prisoners (PDF) subjected to "extraordinary rendition" and torture, either in prisons run by the CIA or by other governments prepared to lend their torturers to the United States.
In addition, while the Order establishing a Task Force to overview detention policy insists that only "lawful options" are pursued, the Task Force on interrogation and transfer policies seems to be set up to find ways in which "extraordinary rendition" can be justified -- though not, admittedly, on an industrial scale -- and also seems designed to "recommend ... additional or different guidance" for agencies outside the military, which is troubling, of course, as this, in essence, is exactly what has been happening for the last seven years, with such dire results. The President should resist all calls for exceptions to lawful procedures, and confirm, categorically, his absolute commitment to non-coercive methods of interrogation, which have a proven track record. See, for example, the Human Rights First report (PDF) examining 107 terror trials on the U.S. mainland, and Jane Mayer's article on the FBI's interrogation of an-Qaeda informant.
I should also note that, just two weeks ago, psychologist and anti-torture activist Jeffrey S. Kaye explained, in an article for AlterNet, that, though widely praised by everyone in the new administration, including President Obama, the revised version of the Army Field Manual contains an Appendix that apparently keeps the door open for the use of the same torture techniques taught in U.S. military schools to train U.S. personnel to resist interrogation that were implemented by the Bush administration and that led directly to the widespread abuse of prisoners in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as a Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF) explained last month.
`
Re: Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
<font size="4">
The Order:
</font size>
<IFRAME SRC="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/">link</A>
</IFRAME>
<font size="4">
The Order:
</font size>
<IFRAME SRC="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/">link</A>
</IFRAME>
↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
Big Ups QueEx-
For reviving these threads, that contain years of truth-telling outlining the criminal violations and deceitful contempt for the US Constitution that the Bushit administration engaged in throughout its disastrous eight year seizure of power. All the pro Bushit sycophants arguments have been exposed & relegated to the same trash bin that contains the Third Reich’s Nazi propaganda. The final act is – will anyone be prosecuted??
Big Ups QueEx-
For reviving these threads, that contain years of truth-telling outlining the criminal violations and deceitful contempt for the US Constitution that the Bushit administration engaged in throughout its disastrous eight year seizure of power. All the pro Bushit sycophants arguments have been exposed & relegated to the same trash bin that contains the Third Reich’s Nazi propaganda. The final act is – will anyone be prosecuted??
Fear Hath No Shelf-Life: Our Torture Dilemma
Fear Hath No Shelf-Life: Our Torture Dilemma
by Robert D. Kaplan
The torture debate is critical not only because it gets us to the core of our values, but because the danger to American cities is not from tanks and armies, but from individuals and their intentions. Saving thousands of American lives may come down to the gifts of a talented interrogator and the tools at his or her disposal. Remember that usually only in the movies does a prisoner spill the beans on an upcoming plot. As interrogators will tell you, information about terrorist activities tends to come in fragments that are assembled from scores of interrogations, even as the truth is distilled—accidentally almost—from a spewing forth of lies and subtle evasions. The front line of our defense against al-Qaeda and its offshoots is painstaking, tedious work that rewards those best able to fill in the blank spaces from a shattered jigsaw puzzle.
Interrogators, because they deal with a single combatant face to face for hours at a time, often develop more sympathy for the enemy than any one else in our security establishment. After all, the combatant, because he has a real face, becomes human to them. Such sympathy is necessary if they are to do their jobs well. “To defeat the enemy you first have to love them—that is, their culture,” an army special forces lieutenant colonel told me years ago in Afghanistan.
Good interrogators become masters at discerning body language and eye movements in the person they are questioning. Their worst enemy is not the inability to torture, but their own bureaucracy, which often doesn’t share vital information with its constituent parts. There is a lot we can do to improve the quality of our interrogations without torturing people.
Also see:
'The Interrogators' and 'Torture': Hard Questions
(January 23, 2005)
Robert D. Kaplan's review of Chris Mackey and Greg Miller's The Interrogators in The New York Times.
And yet the problem is not that easily solved. It nags at one. Stating flatly that torture doesn’t work is a narrow version of the truth. Torture may not work, but the fear of it can work wonders. When a prisoner is captured, you may want him to be roughly handled, and put in grim and disorienting surroundings, for that heightens the fear of what might happen to him next. “Fear is often an interrogator’s best ally, but it doesn’t have a long shelf life,” write Chris Mackey and Greg Miller, authors of The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al-Qaeda, a very wise book by a former interrogator and a journalist. Fear can by extended for a time through clever techniques such as spreading false rumors. Example: the authors report that they received added cooperation from prisoners in Afghanistan after deliberately spreading a rumor that they were going to be sent back to their home countries in the Middle East in return for a $100,000 payment per man. But ultimately, as the weeks pass, and nothing bad happens to him, the prisoner’s fear fades and he becomes less useful. While torture is bad, the thoroughly humane approach, contrary to our desires, has its limits. And that is our dilemma.
Spreading rumors, rough treatment, grim conditions are all the very beginnings of a slippery path toward much worse things. To say that we cannot step even one foot along that path is impractical, for that would deprive the nation of vital intelligence and threaten to leave it defenseless. But to go far along that path is morally unbearable. So the debate is really about how far we do go.
The extreme example that’s frequently discussed—Should we resort to torture in the event of a ticking bomb?—is interesting but statistically not very useful, since most scenarios are much more ambiguous. And again, a single prisoner is more likely to reveal a shard of evidence than the where and when of a plot.
The authors Mackey and Miller describe a group of interrogators who solved their moral dilemma through the use of a technique called “monstering.” That is, if the interrogator had to put up with the same ill-treatment as the prisoner, then it wasn’t immoral. To wit, sleep deprivation combined with long interrogations was allowed if the interrogator himself went without sleep for the same amount of time. But to double-team the prisoner, with one interrogator sleeping while the other worked the prisoner over verbally, was considered immoral. Monstering was a matter of who broke first, the interrogator or the prisoner. And if the prisoner broke first, even part of the time, it was worth doing.
Of course, one could carry this logic as far as waterboarding, since many of our own special operations forces and combat pilots have been waterboarded as part of their training at Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School. Indeed, far more Americans have been waterboarded than prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. But while the Americans who have been waterboarded have been physically and psychologically trained to perfection beforehand, and experience it only for short periods, unsuspecting detainees experience waterboarding under far more onerous circumstances. So what is hard, tough training in one instance, can be torture in another.
But if we can’t—or shouldn’t—waterboard, then how far do we push the envelope? Because if we don’t push it somewhat, we face what I call the 15 percent dilemma. Let me explain.
If we act like angels, and another, even more massive attack occurs in the United States, then the public might cry for blood, as it did to an extent in the immediate days and weeks after 9/11, when torture was occasionally spoken of in different terms than it is now. Remember that some Bush Administration policies were drawn up in the context of one public mood, and carried out in the context of another. Were that to happen, detainees’ rights might decline by, say, 50 percent. But if we push the envelope only 15 percent along that dangerous path, then we might avoid the 50 percent trap, and save many of our own lives.
But even 15 percent makes me queasy. To avoid the question, though, is itself irresponsible.
Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901u/kaplan-torture
Fear Hath No Shelf-Life: Our Torture Dilemma
by Robert D. Kaplan
The torture debate is critical not only because it gets us to the core of our values, but because the danger to American cities is not from tanks and armies, but from individuals and their intentions. Saving thousands of American lives may come down to the gifts of a talented interrogator and the tools at his or her disposal. Remember that usually only in the movies does a prisoner spill the beans on an upcoming plot. As interrogators will tell you, information about terrorist activities tends to come in fragments that are assembled from scores of interrogations, even as the truth is distilled—accidentally almost—from a spewing forth of lies and subtle evasions. The front line of our defense against al-Qaeda and its offshoots is painstaking, tedious work that rewards those best able to fill in the blank spaces from a shattered jigsaw puzzle.
Interrogators, because they deal with a single combatant face to face for hours at a time, often develop more sympathy for the enemy than any one else in our security establishment. After all, the combatant, because he has a real face, becomes human to them. Such sympathy is necessary if they are to do their jobs well. “To defeat the enemy you first have to love them—that is, their culture,” an army special forces lieutenant colonel told me years ago in Afghanistan.
Good interrogators become masters at discerning body language and eye movements in the person they are questioning. Their worst enemy is not the inability to torture, but their own bureaucracy, which often doesn’t share vital information with its constituent parts. There is a lot we can do to improve the quality of our interrogations without torturing people.
Also see:
'The Interrogators' and 'Torture': Hard Questions
(January 23, 2005)
Robert D. Kaplan's review of Chris Mackey and Greg Miller's The Interrogators in The New York Times.
And yet the problem is not that easily solved. It nags at one. Stating flatly that torture doesn’t work is a narrow version of the truth. Torture may not work, but the fear of it can work wonders. When a prisoner is captured, you may want him to be roughly handled, and put in grim and disorienting surroundings, for that heightens the fear of what might happen to him next. “Fear is often an interrogator’s best ally, but it doesn’t have a long shelf life,” write Chris Mackey and Greg Miller, authors of The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al-Qaeda, a very wise book by a former interrogator and a journalist. Fear can by extended for a time through clever techniques such as spreading false rumors. Example: the authors report that they received added cooperation from prisoners in Afghanistan after deliberately spreading a rumor that they were going to be sent back to their home countries in the Middle East in return for a $100,000 payment per man. But ultimately, as the weeks pass, and nothing bad happens to him, the prisoner’s fear fades and he becomes less useful. While torture is bad, the thoroughly humane approach, contrary to our desires, has its limits. And that is our dilemma.
Spreading rumors, rough treatment, grim conditions are all the very beginnings of a slippery path toward much worse things. To say that we cannot step even one foot along that path is impractical, for that would deprive the nation of vital intelligence and threaten to leave it defenseless. But to go far along that path is morally unbearable. So the debate is really about how far we do go.
The extreme example that’s frequently discussed—Should we resort to torture in the event of a ticking bomb?—is interesting but statistically not very useful, since most scenarios are much more ambiguous. And again, a single prisoner is more likely to reveal a shard of evidence than the where and when of a plot.
The authors Mackey and Miller describe a group of interrogators who solved their moral dilemma through the use of a technique called “monstering.” That is, if the interrogator had to put up with the same ill-treatment as the prisoner, then it wasn’t immoral. To wit, sleep deprivation combined with long interrogations was allowed if the interrogator himself went without sleep for the same amount of time. But to double-team the prisoner, with one interrogator sleeping while the other worked the prisoner over verbally, was considered immoral. Monstering was a matter of who broke first, the interrogator or the prisoner. And if the prisoner broke first, even part of the time, it was worth doing.
Of course, one could carry this logic as far as waterboarding, since many of our own special operations forces and combat pilots have been waterboarded as part of their training at Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School. Indeed, far more Americans have been waterboarded than prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. But while the Americans who have been waterboarded have been physically and psychologically trained to perfection beforehand, and experience it only for short periods, unsuspecting detainees experience waterboarding under far more onerous circumstances. So what is hard, tough training in one instance, can be torture in another.
But if we can’t—or shouldn’t—waterboard, then how far do we push the envelope? Because if we don’t push it somewhat, we face what I call the 15 percent dilemma. Let me explain.
If we act like angels, and another, even more massive attack occurs in the United States, then the public might cry for blood, as it did to an extent in the immediate days and weeks after 9/11, when torture was occasionally spoken of in different terms than it is now. Remember that some Bush Administration policies were drawn up in the context of one public mood, and carried out in the context of another. Were that to happen, detainees’ rights might decline by, say, 50 percent. But if we push the envelope only 15 percent along that dangerous path, then we might avoid the 50 percent trap, and save many of our own lives.
But even 15 percent makes me queasy. To avoid the question, though, is itself irresponsible.
Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901u/kaplan-torture
Re: Fear Hath No Shelf-Life: Our Torture Dilemma
<font size="5"><center>
U.S. General: 'mere description' of
torture photos 'horrendous' </font size><font size="4">
controversy over release grows</font size></center>
A detainee at the Abu Ghraib prision in
Baghdad, Iraq shows a prisoner with a
bag over his head, attached to wires.
A former U.S. General says unreleased
photos show prisoners being raped.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, May 28th 2009, 10:36 AM
A former U.S. general said graphic images of rape and torture are among the photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse that President Barack Obama's administration does not want released.
Retired Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the U.S. investigation into the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, was quoted as telling Britain's Daily Telegraph in an article Wednesday that he agreed with Obama's decision not to release the pictures.
"I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them," Taguba was quoted by the Daily Telegraph. "The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it."
It was not exactly clear what photos Taguba was referring to.
A U.S. military official in Baghdad, however, said "the photos referred to are ones that Taguba is not aware of." The official spoke on condition of anonymity Thursday because he was not authorized to release the information.
The military is referring all questions on the matter to Washington. The Obama administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Iraqis called for an investigation into the Daily Telegraph report.
"The Iraqi government must demand the reopening of the Abu Ghraib scandal case again," said Ali Kadom, 45, who works at the Ministry of Transportation.
Khalid Bashi, 35, a trade office owner in Baghdad, said Obama should release the photos to put a stop to a possible scandal.
"Sooner or later, more scandals will appear that show crimes against humanity carried out by American troops in Iraq," Bashi said.
The prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib exploded after photos taken by soldiers appeared in 2004.
According to the Telegraph, the new photos depicted much more serious abuses than previously documented. One photo reportedly showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner and another was said to show a male translator raping a male detainee, the paper reported.
The Telegraph said the photos related to 400 cases of alleged abuse between 2001 and 2005 at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons. It was not immediately clear from the newspaper report who had seen the photos or how they might have been obtained.
The newspaper said the images in the photos were backed up by statements from Taguba's report into prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_...general_calls_unreleased_torture_photos_.html
<font size="5"><center>
U.S. General: 'mere description' of
torture photos 'horrendous' </font size><font size="4">
controversy over release grows</font size></center>
A detainee at the Abu Ghraib prision in
Baghdad, Iraq shows a prisoner with a
bag over his head, attached to wires.
A former U.S. General says unreleased
photos show prisoners being raped.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, May 28th 2009, 10:36 AM
A former U.S. general said graphic images of rape and torture are among the photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse that President Barack Obama's administration does not want released.
Retired Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the U.S. investigation into the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, was quoted as telling Britain's Daily Telegraph in an article Wednesday that he agreed with Obama's decision not to release the pictures.
"I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them," Taguba was quoted by the Daily Telegraph. "The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it."
It was not exactly clear what photos Taguba was referring to.
A U.S. military official in Baghdad, however, said "the photos referred to are ones that Taguba is not aware of." The official spoke on condition of anonymity Thursday because he was not authorized to release the information.
The military is referring all questions on the matter to Washington. The Obama administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Iraqis called for an investigation into the Daily Telegraph report.
"The Iraqi government must demand the reopening of the Abu Ghraib scandal case again," said Ali Kadom, 45, who works at the Ministry of Transportation.
Khalid Bashi, 35, a trade office owner in Baghdad, said Obama should release the photos to put a stop to a possible scandal.
"Sooner or later, more scandals will appear that show crimes against humanity carried out by American troops in Iraq," Bashi said.
The prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib exploded after photos taken by soldiers appeared in 2004.
According to the Telegraph, the new photos depicted much more serious abuses than previously documented. One photo reportedly showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner and another was said to show a male translator raping a male detainee, the paper reported.
The Telegraph said the photos related to 400 cases of alleged abuse between 2001 and 2005 at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons. It was not immediately clear from the newspaper report who had seen the photos or how they might have been obtained.
The newspaper said the images in the photos were backed up by statements from Taguba's report into prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_...general_calls_unreleased_torture_photos_.html
WATCH THIS FILM
"TORTURING DEMOCRACY"
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/program/index1.html
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</iframe>
Download Film - Video: MPEG4 Video 560x272 29.97fps 749kbps -watch on IPad, Android Tablet, ITouch, IPhone, Android Smart Phone, Computer
Code:
https://www.rapidshare.com/files/1358805240/Torturing_Democracy_PBS_2008.mp4The film documentary "Torturing Democracy" aired once on PBS stations in 2008 and then literally disappeared. PBS was so afraid of this scrupulously researched film, consisting of on-the-record interviews with U.S. citizens and military personal who actually witnessed the Cheney-BuShit-Rumsfeld-Rice illegally sanctioned torture of hundreds of Arab prisoners - which resulted in more than 50 deaths, -that many PBS stations refused to air the film. Innocent Arab men, who where misidentified & snatched by U.S. 'black-ops' forces from their homes- who survived as long as 4 years of torture in Afghanistan & Gitmo are interviewed in this film and they describe their harrowing ordeal and the continuing road back to sanity they are traveling. Film footage chronicling Cheney-BuShit-Rumsfeld-Rice authorized, U.S. torture & barbarism, seen hundreds of times in every country in the world except the U.S. is contained in this documentary. With the 2012 U.S. elections just ended, we should not quickly forget that if Romney was elected, the same ideologues who stood with and supported BuShit & company in their zeal and preference for torture would have re-initiated the Cheney-BuShit-Rumsfeld-Rice torture program with full vigor.
For those like myself who were angrily perturbed at Obama's & Holder's failure to prosecute anyone from the BuShit camarilla for deliberately violating U.S. law as it pertains to torture, we get the obvious answer -(I read the info below over a year ago)- that they feared that Obama would literally be killed by the Military-Industrial-Complex -(just like J.F.K.)- if they actually prosecuted and put BuShit capos in jail.
<blockquote>
...Edley apparently tried to justify Obama's "look forward, not backwards" policy toward Bush-era lawbreaking. Instead, Kreig writes, Edley revealed the Obama team's weakness in the face of Republican thuggery:
Edley's rationale implies that Obama and his team fear the military/national security forces that he is supposed be commanding--and that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even though voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history. Edley responded to our request for additional information by providing a description of the transition team's fears, which we present below as an exclusive email interview. Among his important points is that transition officials, not Obama, agreed that he faced the possibility of a coup.
... Obama’s team feared that leadership in the U.S. armed forces, the CIA and NSA might “revolt” if the new Obama administration prosecuted war crimes by U.S. authorities and lower-ranking personnel. Also, Edley told Harman that his fellow decision-makers on Obama's team feared that a prosecution inquiry could lead to Republican efforts to thwart the Obama agenda in Congress.
Chris Edley volunteered that he’d been party to very high-level discussions during Obama’s transition about prosecuting the criminals. He said they decided against it. I asked why. Two reasons: 1) it was thought that the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt, and 2) it was thought the Repugnants would retaliate by blocking every piece of legislation they tried to move (which, of course, they’ve done anyhow).
Afterwards I told him that CIA friends confirmed that Obama would have been in danger, but I added that he bent over backwards to protect the criminals, and gave as an example the DOJ’s defense (state secrets) of Jeppesen (the rendition arm of Boeing) a few days after his inauguration.
He shrugged and said they will never be prosecuted, and that sometimes politics trumps rule of law....
http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2011/09/obama-advisors-feared-coup-if.html
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Cheney & Rumsfeld have been at the center of tilting America perhaps irrevocably toward what Cheney in his own words calls “The Dark Side”. Anyone who is literate, and wants to know the truth can easily read the blood soaked 35 year history of these two psychopaths. In the 1970’s they advised President Nixon & then President Ford to use nuclear weapons to “win”?? – the Vietnam war. Both presidents had enough of a moral compass intact to reject the barbaric advice.
But these two psychopaths would return to high US government posts.
Their joint opportunity came with The bloodless coup d’état of 2000 where 5 members of the Supreme Court outlawed one-man one-vote, stopping the vote counting in Florida because in Justice Scalia words ” the purpose of the court's action was to prevent Bush from falling behind (Gore) in the vote tally”
With Bush the declared victor by ONE Supreme Court vote , completely nullifying the millions of voters who voted for Gore, and in particular not allowing the recounting of the State of Florida’s votes because {SCALIA again} it would be injurious to Mr. Bush ; Cheney & Rumsfeld were now jointly back in the game with an ignorant President that they could easily puppeteer.
MAY 2009
The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition, and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.
Naomi Wolf, in her “Sex Crimes in the White House” article last year, documents the Bush White House’s involvement in committing sex crimes against detainees.
We now know that the torture of prisoners was the result of a policy set in the White House by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Rice — who actually chaired the torture meetings.
The Pentagon has also acknowledged that it had authorized sexualized abuse of detainees as part of interrogation practices to be performed by female operatives. And documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union have Rumsfeld, in his own words, checking in on the sexualized humiliation of prisoners.
The sexualization of torture from the top basically turned Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay into an organized sex-crime ring in which the trafficked sex slaves were US-held prisoners. Looking at the classic S and M nature of some of this torture, it is hard not to speculate that someone setting policy was aroused by all of this.
And Phillipe Sands’ impeccably documented http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230603904/?tag=vp314-20http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230603904/?tag=vp314-20 now proves that sex crime was authorized and, at least one source reports, eroticized: Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo who signed off on many torture techniques, told Sands about brainstorming sessions that included the use of “sexual tension,” which was “culturally taboo, disrespectful, humiliating and potentially unexpected.”
It’s no wonder our government doesn’t want certain photos released. It’s not because doing so would be “too dangerous”; it’s because, as Naomi Wolf notes, the bodies depicted are crime scenes.
But what is far scarier about these images Obama refuses to release and that the Pentagon is likely to be lying about now is that it is not the evidence of lower-level soldiers being corrupted by power –
it is proof of the fact that the most senior leadership – Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, with Rice’s collusion – were running a global sex crime trafficking ring with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Baghram as the holding sites.
The sexual nature of the torture also gives the lie to Cheney’s and others’ defense of torture as somehow functional: the sexual perversity mandated from the top reveals that it was just plain old sick sadism gratified by a very sick form of pleasure. I also pointed out in `Sex Crimes in the White House’ that the escalation of the sexual abuse showed the same classic pattern shown by sex criminals everywhere – you start with stripping the victim, keeping him or her completely in your power, and then you engage in greater and more violent excesses with more and more self-justification.
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Obama and GOPers Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-obama-quashed-torture-investigation
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Explicit exposition from guardian.uk including a must see 51 minute video which step-by-step reveals truths that the U.S. “corporate media” deliberately keeps hidden from the American sheeple. The rest of the worlds print media & television throughout the BuShit years revealed to their audiences the fact that the entire BuShit camarilla — bush, condi, cheney, rumsfeld, cia chief tenet, general petraeus, etc. — were covered in blood and death extracted by torture, up to their eyeballs— even after the revelation of Abu Ghraib. They are all war criminals and to-this-day must avoid traveling to certain countries to avoid the possibility of being detained under international law. Watch the videos, read the articles……….and understand why there will be no defamation of character lawsuits against the guardian from any of the scoundrels exposed; — they can’t sue because it’s all true. We find out that cheney and others in the white house actually watched video of the torture of “combatants”; petraeus & other U.S. military saw the torture live, all in violation of U.S. laws and International Laws that were on the books. Does any of this matter 10 years later? That should be up to the American people but most Americans will never even contemplate these issues. It all goes down the ’memory hole’. Corporate media television giant Viacom (CBS) has recently hired Condi ‘mushroom cloud’ Rice to work in their ‘CBS News’ division; imagine that — who’s next, will Donald Rumsfeld get the “Meet The Press” show or maybe BuShit himself will get ABC’s Sunday News Chat program. War criminal roundtable.
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US Special Forces Veteran Links General Petraeus To Torture In Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/us-petraeus-torture-iraq-video
Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres
Exclusive: General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link
March 6, 2013
The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.
Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.
After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.
A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.
Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.
The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.
Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus's "eyes and ears out on the ground" in Iraq.
"They worked hand in hand," said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. "I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ... the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture."
Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. "Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee," claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.
"Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts."
There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.
The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.
Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. "I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library's columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten."
Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. "We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I'm looking around I see blood everywhere."
The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. "And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: 'Allah, Allah, Allah!' But it wasn't kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror."
The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador's security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.
Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is "opposed to human rights abuses." Coffman declined to comment.
An official speaking for Petraeus said: "During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad ... and the relevant Iraqi leaders."
The Guardian has learned that the SPC units' involvement with torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their victims were paraded in front of a TV audience on a programme called "Terrorism In The Hands of Justice."
SPC detention centers bought video cameras, funded by the US military, which they used to film detainees for the show. When the show began to outrage the Iraqi public, Samari remembers being in the home of General Adnan Thabit – head of the special commandos – when a call came from Petraeus's office demanding that they stop showing tortured men on TV.
"General Petraeus's special translator, Sadi Othman, rang up to pass on a message from General Petraeus telling us not to show the prisoners on TV after they had been tortured," said Samari. "Then 20 minutes later we got a call from the Iraqi ministry of interior telling us the same thing, that General Petraeus didn't want the torture victims shown on TV."
Othman, who now lives in New York, confirmed that he made the phone call on behalf of Petraeus to the head of the SPC to ask him to stop showing the tortured prisoners. "But General Petraeus does not agree with torture," he added. "To suggest he does support torture is horseshit."
Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were unaware of what the commandos were doing. "Until I left, the Americans knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the interrogations and they knew the detainees. Even some of the intelligence about the detainees came to us from them – they are lying."
Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.
The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.
The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorized the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.
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Condi "Mushroom Cloud" Rice Deliberately Lying On CNN
The BuShit camarilla led by Cheney –Rumsfeld engaged in a maniacal pursuit to circumvent the constitution of the United States; bypassing congress and the federal judiciary, — green lighting the use of ‘torture’ — and violating with impunity settled law domestic & international, in a craven pursuit to fulfill their neo-con wet dream of full spectrum dominance of the planet earth.
In the videos below — Former Supreme NATO Commander and four star general Wesley Clark discusses hearing about the neo-cons plans from Wolfowitz as early as 1991 when he met him at the Pentagon. Ten days after 9/11, Clark again visiting the Pentagon heard about Rumsfeld’s plan to militarily invade Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, & Sudan in what he calls a “policy coup d’état” — a total repudiation of U.S. ‘rule-of-law’ — usurping the will of the congress and the American people. Under the international laws the United States and other western allies set up after World War 2 at Nuremberg — Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, bush and others are all war criminals.
Condi "Mushroom Cloud" Rice Deliberately Lying On CNN
The BuShit camarilla led by Cheney –Rumsfeld engaged in a maniacal pursuit to circumvent the constitution of the United States; bypassing congress and the federal judiciary, — green lighting the use of ‘torture’ — and violating with impunity settled law domestic & international, in a craven pursuit to fulfill their neo-con wet dream of full spectrum dominance of the planet earth.
In the videos below — Former Supreme NATO Commander and four star general Wesley Clark discusses hearing about the neo-cons plans from Wolfowitz as early as 1991 when he met him at the Pentagon. Ten days after 9/11, Clark again visiting the Pentagon heard about Rumsfeld’s plan to militarily invade Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, & Sudan in what he calls a “policy coup d’état” — a total repudiation of U.S. ‘rule-of-law’ — usurping the will of the congress and the American people. Under the international laws the United States and other western allies set up after World War 2 at Nuremberg — Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, bush and others are all war criminals.
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Sometime later this year (2013) the world will witness the unveiling and opening of the BuShit presidential library in Texas. Smiling individuals representing the crème de la crème of American empire will all be present.
Current and former presidents of the U.S., members of the BuShit camarilla, and others, will all cluster around a memorial library which honors the administration of international war criminals.
The guardian.co.uk continuing its ten year anniversary Iraq war expose, reveals more BuShit administration authorized torture & barbarity.
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Camp Nama:
British Personnel Reveal Horrors Of Secret US Base In Baghdad
Detainees captured by SAS and SBS squads subjected to human-rights abuses
at detention centre, say British witnesses
by Ian Cobain | April 4, 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/01/camp-nama-iraq-human-rights-abuses/print
British soldiers and airmen who helped to operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion have, for the first time, spoken about abuses they witnessed there.
Personnel from two RAF squadrons and one Army Air Corps squadron were given guard and transport duties at the secret prison, the Guardian has established.
And many of the detainees were brought to the facility by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons.
Codenamed Task Force 121, the joint US-UK special forces unit was at first deployed to detain individuals thought to have information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Once it was realised that Saddam's regime had long since abandoned its WMD programme, TF 121 was re-tasked with tracking down people who might know where the deposed dictator and his loyalists might be, and then with catching al-Qaida leaders who sprang up in the country after the regime collapsed.
Suspects were brought to the secret prison at Baghdad International airport, known as Camp Nama, for questioning by
US military and civilian interrogators. But the methods used were so brutal that they drew condemnation not only from a US human rights body but from a special investigator reporting to the Pentagon.
A British serviceman who served at Nama recalled: "I saw one man having his prosthetic leg being pulled off him, and being beaten about the head with it before he was thrown on to the truck."
On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a number of former members of TF 121 and its successor unit TF6-26 have come forward to describe the abuses they witnessed, and to state that they complained about the mistreatment of detainees.
The abuses they say they saw include:
• Iraqi prisoners being held for prolonged periods in cells the size of large dog kennels.
• Prisoners being subjected to electric shocks.
• Prisoners being routinely hooded.
• Inmates being taken into a sound-proofed shipping container for interrogation, and emerging in a state of physical distress.
It is unclear how many of their complaints were registered or passed up the chain of command. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said a search of its records did not turn up "anything specific" about complaints from British personnel at Camp Nama, or anything that substantiated such complaints.
Nevertheless, the emergence of evidence of British involvement in the running of such a notorious detention facility appears to raise fresh questions about ministerial approval of operations that resulted in serious human rights abuses.
Geoff Hoon, defence secretary at the time, insisted he had no knowledge of Camp Nama. When it was pointed out to him that the British military had provided transport services and a guard force, and had helped to detain Nama's inmates, he replied: "I've never heard of the place."
The MoD, on the other hand, repeatedly failed to address questions about ministerial approval of British operations at Camp Nama. Nor would the department say whether ministers had been made aware of concerns about human rights abuses there.
Former army officer Crispin Blunt accused defence secretary John Hutton in 2009 of sweeping under the carpet the evidence of direct British service involvement.
However, one peculiarity of the way in which UK forces operated when bringing prisoners to Camp Nama suggests that ministers and senior MoD officials may have had reason to know those detainees were at risk of mistreatment. British soldiers were almost always accompanied by a lone American soldier, who was then recorded as having captured the prisoner. Members of the SAS and SBS were repeatedly briefed on the importance of this measure.
It was an arrangement that enabled the British government to side-step a Geneva convention clause that would have obliged it to demand the return of any prisoner transferred to the US once it became apparent that they were not being treated in accordance with the convention. And it consigned the prisoners to what some lawyers have described as a legal black hole.
Surrounded by row after row of wire fencing, guarded by either US Rangers or RAF personnel, and with an Abrams tank parked permanently at its main gate, to the outside observer Camp Nama seemed identical to scores of military bases that sprang up after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Once inside, however, it was clear that Nama was different.
Not that many people did enter the special forces prison. It was off limits to most members of the US and UK military, with even the officer commanding the US detention facility at Guantánamo being refused entry at one point. Inspectors from the International Committee of the Red Cross were never admitted through its gates.
One person who has been widely reported to have been seen there frequently was General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of US Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq.
General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of US Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, was said to have visited Nama.
While Abu Ghraib prison, just a few miles to the west, would achieve global notoriety after photographs emerged depicting abuses committed there, Camp Nama escaped attention for a simple reason: photography was banned. The only people who attempted to take pictures – a pair of US Navy Seals – were promptly arrested. All discussion of what happened there was forbidden.
Before establishing its prison at Nama, TF 121 had been known as Task Force 20, and had run a detention and interrogation facility at a remote location known as H1, in Iraq's western desert. At least one prisoner had died en route to H1,
allegedly kicked to death aboard an RAF Chinook.
The British were always junior partners in TF 121. Their contingent was known as Task Force Black. US Delta Force troops made up Task Force Green and US Army Rangers Task Force Red. One half of Task Force Black comprised SAS and SBS troopers, based a short distance away at the government compound known as the Green Zone. They detained so-called high-value detainees, who were brought to Camp Nama. The other half were the air and ground crews of 7 Squadron and 47 Squadron of the RAF, and 657 Squadron of the Army Air Corps, who lived on the camp itself, operating helicopters used in detention operations and a Hercules transport aircraft.
"The Americans went out to bring in prisoners every night, and British special forces would go out once or twice a week, almost always with one American accompanying them," one British serviceman who served at Nama recalled earlier this month.
''The prisoners would be brought in by helicopter, usually one at a time, although I once saw five being led off a Chinook. They were taken into a large hangar to be bagged and tagged, a bag put over their heads and their hands plasticuffed behind their backs. Then they would be lifted or thrown on to the back of a pick-up truck and driven to the Joint Operations Centre."
The Joint Operations Centre, or JOC, was a single storey building a few hundred yards from the airport's main runway. Some of those who served at Nama believed it had formerly been used by Saddam's intelligence agencies.
The US and UK forces worked together so closely that they began to wear items of each others' uniforms. But while British personnel were permitted into the front of the JOC, few were allowed into the rear, where interrogations took place. This was the preserve of US military interrogators and CIA officers based at Camp Nama. "They included a number of women," said one British airman. "One had a ponytail and always wore two pistols, so we had to nickname her Lara Croft."
There were four interrogation cells at the rear of the JOC, known as the blue, red, black and soft rooms, as well as a medical screening area. The soft room contained sofas and rugs, and was a place where detainees could be shown some kindness. Harsh interrogations took place in the red and blue rooms, while the black room – described as windowless, with hooks in the ceiling, and where every surface was painted black – is said to be the cell where the worse abuses were perpetrated.
According to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, the New York-based NGO, detainees were subject to "beatings, exposure to extreme cold, threats of death, humiliation and various forms of psychological abuse or torture" at the JOC. The New York Times has reported that prisoners were beaten with rifle butts and had paintball guns fired at them for target practice.
Signs posted around Nama are said to have proclaimed the warning "No Blood, No Foul": if interrogators did not make a prisoner bleed, they would not face disciplinary action.
There was also an overspill interrogation room cell behind the JOC: a shipping container lined with padding. "You could see people being taken in there, and they were in pretty poor shape when they were taken out," said one British witness. He adds: "Everyone's seen the Abu Ghraib pictures. But I've seen it with my own eyes."
A number of British soldiers who served with TF 121 said that some SAS officers were permitted to attend interrogations at the rear of the JOC. Human Rights Watch reports that one SAS officer took part in the beating of a prisoner thought to know the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq.
While not being interrogated, according to witnesses, prisoners were held in cells the size of large dog kennels. "They were made of wire mesh with sloping corrugated roofs," said a British ex-serviceman who served at Nama. "They were chest high, and two feet wide. There were about 100 of them, in three rows, and they always appeared to have at least one prisoner in each. They would be freezing at night, and really hot during the day.
"The prisoners were mostly men, although I did see two women being taken into the JOC for interrogation. I've no idea what became of them, or to any of the male prisoners after their interrogation was completed."
Some of the scenes at Nama were so disturbing that personnel serving there would literally look the other way, rather than witness the abuse. "I remember being on sentry duty at a post overlooking the dog kennels, and the guy I was with wouldn't even look at them," one British eyewitness recalls. "I was saying: 'Hey turn around and look at them.' And he wouldn't. He just wouldn't turn around, because he knew they were there."
Some complaints made at the time by British personnel were immediately suppressed. "I remember talking to one
British army officer about what I had seen, and he replied: 'You didn't see that – do you understand?' There was a great deal of nervousness about the place. I had the impression that the British were scared we would be kicked off the operation if we made a fuss," the ex-serviceman said.
According to one US interrogator interviewed by Human Rights Watch, however, written authorisations were required for many of the abuses inflicted on prisoners at Nama, indicating that their use was approved up the chain of command.
"There was an authorisation template on a computer, a sheet that you would print out, or actually just type it in," the interrogator said. "It was a checklist. It was already typed out for you, environmental controls, hot and cold, you know, strobe lights, music, so forth. But you would just check what you want to use off, and if you planned on using a harsh interrogation you'd just get it signed off. It would be signed off by the commander."
According to one British serviceman who was at Nama, US soldiers would bring prisoners in every night.
Camp Nama was such a secret location that when General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, was sent to Iraq in August 2003 to advise on interrogation regimes he was initially refused entry, according to Human Rights Watch.
At the end of 2003, the Pentagon sent a special investigator, Stuart Herrington, a retired military intelligence colonel, to discover more about the methods being employed at Nama. In December that year Herrington reported: "Detainees captured by TF 121 have shown injuries that caused examining medical personnel to note that 'detainee shows signs of having been beaten'. It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees."
More than 30 members of the task force were subsequently disciplined for abusing prisoners. Yet the beatings continued, according to British witnesses. The dog kennel cells remained in place, and UK special forces continued to be used to snatch suspects to be brought in for interrogation. "I can see now that we were supplying the meat for the American interrogators," says one.
In February 2004, senior British special forces and intelligence officers felt emboldened enough to mount a detention operation without an accompanying US soldier. Troopers surrounded a house in southern Baghdad that MI6 had identified as a safe house for foreign fighters. Two men were killed in the raid and two others of Pakistani origin were detained and handed over to the US authorities.
After questioning at Nama, the pair were flown to Bagram, north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, where they are thought to remain incarcerated,
despite efforts by lawyers to secure their release by persuading the appeal court in London to order the issuing of a writ of habeas corpus.
Two months later, in April 2004, US news media published a series of shocking photographs showing the abuse of prisoners at a different prison, Abu Ghraib, where individuals detained by regular troops rather than special forces were being held. A few days later Task Force 121 was renamed Task Force 6-26. Shortly after this, two US Navy Seals – who had their own compound with Camp Nama – were seen taking photographs from the roof of their building. Both men were immediately arrested, British witnesses say and were not seen at Nama again.
Later that summer the secret prison was moved to Balad, a sprawling air base 50 miles north of Baghdad, where it became known as the Temporary Screening Facility (TSF). The Army Air Force and RAF troops continued their role there.
SAS troops continued to provide detainees for interrogation, operating from their base in one of a row of seven large villas inside the Green Zone. The villa next door was occupied by troops from Delta Force. Each of the homes had a swimming pool, and at the end of the long garden behind the SAS villa was a large hut occupied by a UK military intelligence unit, the Joint Forward Interrogation Team, or JFIT.
Individuals detained by the SAS – accompanied by their lone American escort – would be flown by helicopter to a landing pad behind the villas, and taken straight to the JFIT. According to former members of TF 6-26, after a brief interrogation by the British, they would be handed over to US forces, who would question them further before releasing them, or arrange for them to be flown north to Balad.
In late 2003, according to former taskforce members, two SAS members wandered next door to the Delta Force villa, where they were horrified to see two Iraqi prisoners being tortured. "They were being given electric shocks from cattle prods and their heads were being held under the water in the swimming pool. There were less visits next door after that."
While a complaint was made, it is not thought to have reported through the chain of command. And it certainly appears not to have reached Downing Street, as shortly afterwards Tony Blair, then prime minister, visited the SAS house to thank the troopers for their efforts.
By the end of 2004, according to the BBC journalist Mark Urban, MI6 officers who had visited the secret prison at Balad were expressing concern that the kennel cells had been reconstructed there, and the British government later warned the US authorities that it would hand over prisoners only if there was an undertaking that they would not be sent there.
Shortly afterwards, the RAF Hercules operated by the task force was shot down while flying from Nama to Balad, with the loss of all 10 men on board. It was the largest loss of life suffered by the RAF in a single incident since the second world war.
By now, a growing number of British members of the task force were deeply disillusioned about their role. When one, SAS trooper Ben Griffin,
decided he could not return to Iraq, he expected to be face a court martial. Instead, he discovered that a number of his officers sympathised with him, and he was permitted to leave the army with a first-class testimonial.
When Griffin went public, making clear that British troops were handing over to the US military large numbers of prisoners who faced torture, the MoD came under pressure to explain itself. In February 2009 the then defence secretary, John Hutton, told the Commons that "review of records of detention resulting from security operations carried out by UK armed forces" had disclosed that two men who had been handed over had since been moved to Afghanistan. His statement made no mention of the joint task force, of H1, or of Camp Nama or Balad or how British airmen and soldiers were helping to operate the secret prisons.
Crispin Blunt, a Tory MP and former army officer,
accused Hutton of "simply sweeping under the carpet the apparent evidence of direct British service involvement with delivery to gross mistreatment amounting to torture involving hundreds if not thousands of people".
Today, 10 years after the invasion and the creation of the joint US-UK taskforce that detained and interrogated large numbers of Iraqis, the MoD responds to questions about their abuse by stating that it is aware only of "anecdotal accounts" of mistreatment, and that "any further evidence of human rights abuse should be passed to the appropriate authorities for investigation".
Griffin had done just that, asking the MoD itself to investigate the activities of the taskforce of which he had been a member. The MoD
obtained an injunction to silence him, and warned he faced jail if he ever spoke out again.
Camp Nama: Baghdad's Secret Torture Facility
British soldiers and airmen served at a secretive US detention facility that was
the scene of some of the worst human rights abuses of the Iraq war
View Baghdad's secret torture facility
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source: Syracuse.com
Polls show a majority of Americans support torture of terrorism suspects; do you?
In this March 3, 2005 file photo, a workman slides a dustmop over the floor at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va. Senate investigators have delivered a damning indictment of CIA interrogation practices after the 9/11 attacks, accusing the agency of inflicting pain and suffering on prisoners with tactics that went well beyond legal limits. The torture report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee says the CIA deceived the nation with its insistence that the harsh interrogation tactics had saved lives. It says those claims are unsubstantiated by the CIA's own records. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (J. Scott Applewhite / AP)
December 10, 2014
The CIA torture report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee reveals the harsh tactics U.S. operatives used in an effort to obtain information about terrorists and terrorist plots.
View full size
Americans' views of torture in pursuit of information about terrorism have evolved over time.Pew Research Center
And according to past polling by the Pew Research Center and others, Americans are generally, and somewhat surprisingly, OK with that.
In Pew's first survey on the subject, in July 2004, a majority of respondents (53 percent) said torture to gain important information from terrorism suspects can be justified "rarely'' or "never.'' Meanwhile, 43 percent said torture is "often'' or "sometimes'' justified.
In Pew's August 2011 survey, the tables were turned. At that time, 53 percent of respondents said torture was often or sometimes justified.
More recent polling confirms that finding. A 2013 Associated Press/NORC poll found half of respondents said torture could often or sometimes be justified and 47 percent said it was rarely or never justified.
Human rights groups cite the U.N. convention against torture as grounds to prosecute U.S. officials who approved and executed the U.S. program of enhanced interrogations.
"Under the U.N. convention against torture, no exceptional circumstances whatsoever can be invoked to justify torture, and all those responsible for authorizing or carrying out torture or other ill-treatment must be fully investigated," said Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven W. Hawkins in a statement.
Defenders of the CIA said the interrogations produced actionable intelligence that prevented terrorist attacks. The report concludes otherwise.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who suffered torture while a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said torture was just as likely to produce false information. McCain broke from many in his party to praise the release of the torture report.
"The use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights," he said.
What's your view? Can torture ever be justified? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Polls show a majority of Americans support torture of terrorism suspects; do you?
In this March 3, 2005 file photo, a workman slides a dustmop over the floor at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va. Senate investigators have delivered a damning indictment of CIA interrogation practices after the 9/11 attacks, accusing the agency of inflicting pain and suffering on prisoners with tactics that went well beyond legal limits. The torture report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee says the CIA deceived the nation with its insistence that the harsh interrogation tactics had saved lives. It says those claims are unsubstantiated by the CIA's own records. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (J. Scott Applewhite / AP)
December 10, 2014
The CIA torture report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee reveals the harsh tactics U.S. operatives used in an effort to obtain information about terrorists and terrorist plots.
View full sizeAmericans' views of torture in pursuit of information about terrorism have evolved over time.Pew Research Center
And according to past polling by the Pew Research Center and others, Americans are generally, and somewhat surprisingly, OK with that.
In Pew's first survey on the subject, in July 2004, a majority of respondents (53 percent) said torture to gain important information from terrorism suspects can be justified "rarely'' or "never.'' Meanwhile, 43 percent said torture is "often'' or "sometimes'' justified.
In Pew's August 2011 survey, the tables were turned. At that time, 53 percent of respondents said torture was often or sometimes justified.
More recent polling confirms that finding. A 2013 Associated Press/NORC poll found half of respondents said torture could often or sometimes be justified and 47 percent said it was rarely or never justified.
Human rights groups cite the U.N. convention against torture as grounds to prosecute U.S. officials who approved and executed the U.S. program of enhanced interrogations.
"Under the U.N. convention against torture, no exceptional circumstances whatsoever can be invoked to justify torture, and all those responsible for authorizing or carrying out torture or other ill-treatment must be fully investigated," said Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven W. Hawkins in a statement.
Defenders of the CIA said the interrogations produced actionable intelligence that prevented terrorist attacks. The report concludes otherwise.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who suffered torture while a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said torture was just as likely to produce false information. McCain broke from many in his party to praise the release of the torture report.
"The use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights," he said.
What's your view? Can torture ever be justified? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Re: Senate Democrats and 9/11 Amnesia
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CIA Releases New and Gruesome Details on Its Torture Program
By Dror Ladin,
Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project
June 15, 2016 | 5:00 PM |https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/cia-releases-new-and-gruesome-details-its-torture-program
The CIA released 50 new documents yesterday relating to its post-9/11 torture and rendition program. Despite the many disclosures that have come in the course of our decade-long fight to reveal the details of the program, the new revelations still have the capacity to shock.
The documents, released in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, vividly depict the brutality of torture, and further expose the fiction that this abuse is a scientific method for extracting information from victims. The documents also reveal how hard the CIA worked to bury the evidence of its crimes — including by seeking to silence its victims.
A few of the many new findings include:
CIA pressure to “break” detainees was deadly. A newly released CIA inspector general report about the death of detainee Gul Rahman concluded that he was singled out for especially harsh torture because of “pressure” to “break him.” We learned that he was kept nude or in a diaper for most of his detention, “solely for humiliation.” When they ran out of diapers, the guards would use “a handcrafted diaper secured by duct tape.” CIA torturers kept Rahman naked in “cold conditions with minimal food or sleep” and kept questioning him even when he “appeared incoherent.” When they decided he wasn’t sufficiently “broken,” CIA personnel brutalized, starved, and froze him to death — and then lied about it.
We also learned just why the CIA and Bruce Jessen, one of the psychologists who designed the program, considered Rahman “resistant,” leading to torture so extreme that it resulted in his death. Based on pseudoscientific theories of torture and “resistance,” they assessed Rahman to have a “sophisticated level of resistance training,” because — among other reasons — he “complained about poor treatment” and said he couldn’t “think due to conditions (cold).” No one has yet been held accountable for Mr. Rahman’s death, but the ACLU represents Mr. Rahman’s family in suing Jensen and James Mitchell, the other psychologist who collaborated with the CIA in designing and overseeing the torture program.
The CIA’s rush to use the most brutal techniques on prisoners it decided were “resistant.” Although the CIA claimed that it would only use its most extreme torture techniques after more moderate interrogation methods failed,we now know from previously secret sections of the CIA inspector general report that the CIA in fact “accelerated” the use of waterboarding because “it was considered by some in Agency management to be the ‘silver bullet.’” The CIA would “rapidly escalate” to the waterboard based on its flawed belief that if a prisoner couldn’t provide new information, he must be withholding. Under the CIA’s logic, the less a detainee had to say, the more he would be tortured because “analysts are reluctant to agree that a detainee is not employing resistance techniques.”
More details about the extent to which the CIA was willing to go try and keep its crimes secret. Newly disclosed sections of the inspector general report reveal that “a particular concern for senior Agency managers is the long-term disposition of detainees who have undergone” torture. They were “loath to send CIA detainees” who had been tortured “to detention facilities where they would be available to the ICRC [the International Committee for the Red Cross].” In document after document, CIA employees made clear that they wanted a guarantee that their victims would never — for the rest of their lives — have a chance to tell their stories.
The documents also reveal why the CIA was so obsessed with secrecy: As everyone knew, the torture program could never withstand legal scrutiny. That is why the CIA discussed seeking an extraordinary “get out of jail free card” — an advance an advance promise from the attorney general Alberto Gonzales not to prosecute its agents for their crimes.”
The CIA’s fixation on secrecy even impeded its own intelligence work. Newly disclosed sections of the inspector general report describe senior officers expressing concern that efforts to keep the existence of the torture program secret were blocking “the dissemination of information obtained from the interrogation of detainees to analysts and the FBI in a timely manner.”
This new cache of documents fills in the picture of one of our darkest hours. Today, when loud voices call for a return to brutal and unlawful torture methods, it’s more important than ever that we have access to the full story of CIA torture. These documents, which the CIA suppressed for years, show just how horrific the torture program was, and how shameful it is that none of the perpetrators have yet been held accountable for their crimes.
The original source of this article is ACLU
Copyright © Dror Ladin, ACLU, 2016
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Man all this bullshit propaganda to hide the fact
The real torture they were doing...
That story has yet to be told.
Like the fact they have a male rape unit
And most of the victims are young boys
That's just the tip of the iceberg
The real torture they were doing...
That story has yet to be told.
Like the fact they have a male rape unit
And most of the victims are young boys
That's just the tip of the iceberg
Moderator’s Note: this article was
first published December 10, 2014.
CIA torture report: These depravities are not going to infuriate the Muslim world – they've been enraged about them for years - Robert Fisk.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voice...ers-fear-we-are-the-bad-guys-too-9916406.html
Up to the end, they wanted to keep it secret.
And the vicious psychopaths and sadists that ran the CIA’s torture centres “on our behalf” must be protected, even praised by the Bushies for keeping our civilisation safe. Their lies – to us as well as their victims – were all in the cause of freedom, so let’s have no more talk of Muslims standing on broken feet, bubbling through the mouth after 82 rounds of waterboarding or being fed hummus through the rectum.
And the Republicans and Bushies, sniffing how badly they come out of all this – of course the release of these vile tortures is “ideologically motivated”, just as they claim – now respond with an excuse that almost parallels the weapons-of-mass-destruction-al-Qaeda-links-to-Saddam-Niger-tubes tosh we were fed before we embarked on our slaughter in Iraq 11 years ago. In fact, it’s the same old rubbish they churned out before the obscene Abu Ghraib photos were published. “It will significantly endanger Americans around the world,” the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told us.
So we’ve locked up our embassies and put our people on red alert or purple alert or whatever infantile coding suffices to terrorise Americans and their friends, and we’ve concocted the lie – perhaps as poisonous as all the other CIA lies – that the Arab Muslim world will be really, really angry when they learn about the atrocities our chaps committed in the cause of freedom, liberty and the West. That’s what they said about the Abu Ghraib snapshots – these Arab chappies are going to be awfully upset when they see the snapshots of piled human torsos and the guy in the hood strung up with electric wires. And they might be so angry that they might turn violent. Now, it’s the same again with the CIA report.
All nonsense. The CIA’s depravities are not going to infuriate the Muslim world – because the Muslim world has been enraged about these crimes for years. They were the victims, for heaven’s sake. They were the witnesses. They knew the truth long before our masters admitted the truth to us. These poor men – and women, if we include the female victims of rape at Abu Ghraib, whose pictures we were never allowed to see – came home, most of them, years ago, and told their families and friends all about the iniquities we inflicted upon them. Theirs was the only testament that counted. It was true.
The fear of our masters – of the Pentagon, the Bushies, the CIA – is not that the Arabs will be shocked by these revelations. Their anxiety is that we will be so ashamed at what they have done in our name that we will consider them war criminals (which, of course, they are) and perhaps lock them up in – and here, I love the American phrase for prison – “a correctional institution”. Indeed, some may argue that many of these criminal men (and, alas, women) need psychological help to “deradicalise” them. For yes, while we waffle on and on about the “radicalisation” of our young people who go to join the criminals of Isis, we pay no attention to the equally frightful “radicalisation” of the thugs and misfits (or perhaps not misfits at all) in the CIA – and the smarmy acceptance of their methods by our own security services, in so far as they accepted information gained under torture – who were “radicalised” (oddly, the word makes more sense in this context) by the desire to inflict suffering in the torture chambers of the
A detainee with wires attached to him in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2003 (AP)
Yes, it is our fury and surprise and anger at these revelations which leads the Republicans – thankfully, not all of them – to denounce the CIA report, even though it is a highly censored version of the original, just as the Abu Ghraib photos were a highly censored collection of the pictures that were available. It is we who are saying: Did we do this? Did our public servants perform these acts in the torture chambers? In our name?
But we should have realised all this when Dick Cheney started talking of the “dark side”, when the CIA denied those black prisons in Poland and Romania, when the first detainees came home and told us of their suffering. It was all “propaganda”. I remember our masters reassuring us that this was Baathist propaganda or rebel propaganda or terrorist propaganda or Islamist propaganda – the British used the same stuff (IRA or terrorist propaganda) when they were in conflict in Northern Ireland. So did the French in Algeria. And the moment you allow the sleek young men of the CIA – actively encouraged by the most recent American television serials promoting brutality and assassination – to torture against “terror”, you’re in the same basket as the bad guys. We are the bad guys, too. That’s what the US Senate Intelligence Committee report told us this week.
As for poor old Obama, well, you can read his own statement any way you like. “I will continue to use my authority as President to make sure we never resort to those methods again.” Just like he was going to close Guantanamo forever. Just like he’s using more drones than the Bushies ever contemplated sending against their enemies – and civilians. Well, at least we’re not as bad as Isis. We don’t cut throats or enslave women (although the rapes at Abu Ghraib come a close second). As a former British Prime Minister used to remind us when the mass graves were filling up in Iraq, at least we’re not as bad as Saddam.
Some moral compass that!
first published December 10, 2014.
CIA torture report: These depravities are not going to infuriate the Muslim world – they've been enraged about them for years - Robert Fisk.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voice...ers-fear-we-are-the-bad-guys-too-9916406.html
Up to the end, they wanted to keep it secret.
And the vicious psychopaths and sadists that ran the CIA’s torture centres “on our behalf” must be protected, even praised by the Bushies for keeping our civilisation safe. Their lies – to us as well as their victims – were all in the cause of freedom, so let’s have no more talk of Muslims standing on broken feet, bubbling through the mouth after 82 rounds of waterboarding or being fed hummus through the rectum.
And the Republicans and Bushies, sniffing how badly they come out of all this – of course the release of these vile tortures is “ideologically motivated”, just as they claim – now respond with an excuse that almost parallels the weapons-of-mass-destruction-al-Qaeda-links-to-Saddam-Niger-tubes tosh we were fed before we embarked on our slaughter in Iraq 11 years ago. In fact, it’s the same old rubbish they churned out before the obscene Abu Ghraib photos were published. “It will significantly endanger Americans around the world,” the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told us.
So we’ve locked up our embassies and put our people on red alert or purple alert or whatever infantile coding suffices to terrorise Americans and their friends, and we’ve concocted the lie – perhaps as poisonous as all the other CIA lies – that the Arab Muslim world will be really, really angry when they learn about the atrocities our chaps committed in the cause of freedom, liberty and the West. That’s what they said about the Abu Ghraib snapshots – these Arab chappies are going to be awfully upset when they see the snapshots of piled human torsos and the guy in the hood strung up with electric wires. And they might be so angry that they might turn violent. Now, it’s the same again with the CIA report.
All nonsense. The CIA’s depravities are not going to infuriate the Muslim world – because the Muslim world has been enraged about these crimes for years. They were the victims, for heaven’s sake. They were the witnesses. They knew the truth long before our masters admitted the truth to us. These poor men – and women, if we include the female victims of rape at Abu Ghraib, whose pictures we were never allowed to see – came home, most of them, years ago, and told their families and friends all about the iniquities we inflicted upon them. Theirs was the only testament that counted. It was true.
The fear of our masters – of the Pentagon, the Bushies, the CIA – is not that the Arabs will be shocked by these revelations. Their anxiety is that we will be so ashamed at what they have done in our name that we will consider them war criminals (which, of course, they are) and perhaps lock them up in – and here, I love the American phrase for prison – “a correctional institution”. Indeed, some may argue that many of these criminal men (and, alas, women) need psychological help to “deradicalise” them. For yes, while we waffle on and on about the “radicalisation” of our young people who go to join the criminals of Isis, we pay no attention to the equally frightful “radicalisation” of the thugs and misfits (or perhaps not misfits at all) in the CIA – and the smarmy acceptance of their methods by our own security services, in so far as they accepted information gained under torture – who were “radicalised” (oddly, the word makes more sense in this context) by the desire to inflict suffering in the torture chambers of the
A detainee with wires attached to him in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2003 (AP)
Yes, it is our fury and surprise and anger at these revelations which leads the Republicans – thankfully, not all of them – to denounce the CIA report, even though it is a highly censored version of the original, just as the Abu Ghraib photos were a highly censored collection of the pictures that were available. It is we who are saying: Did we do this? Did our public servants perform these acts in the torture chambers? In our name?
But we should have realised all this when Dick Cheney started talking of the “dark side”, when the CIA denied those black prisons in Poland and Romania, when the first detainees came home and told us of their suffering. It was all “propaganda”. I remember our masters reassuring us that this was Baathist propaganda or rebel propaganda or terrorist propaganda or Islamist propaganda – the British used the same stuff (IRA or terrorist propaganda) when they were in conflict in Northern Ireland. So did the French in Algeria. And the moment you allow the sleek young men of the CIA – actively encouraged by the most recent American television serials promoting brutality and assassination – to torture against “terror”, you’re in the same basket as the bad guys. We are the bad guys, too. That’s what the US Senate Intelligence Committee report told us this week.
As for poor old Obama, well, you can read his own statement any way you like. “I will continue to use my authority as President to make sure we never resort to those methods again.” Just like he was going to close Guantanamo forever. Just like he’s using more drones than the Bushies ever contemplated sending against their enemies – and civilians. Well, at least we’re not as bad as Isis. We don’t cut throats or enslave women (although the rapes at Abu Ghraib come a close second). As a former British Prime Minister used to remind us when the mass graves were filling up in Iraq, at least we’re not as bad as Saddam.
Some moral compass that!